Most people occasionally need to mail packages. Most people also have jobs. The U.S. Postal Service is in financial trouble, and desperately needs our package-mailing funds. They’re not about to expand the hours that post offices are open to accommodate office workers, though, so they compromise: post office lobbies are open 24/7 and Automated Postal Centers are ready for your package-mailing needs. Blue mailboxes can only accommodate parcels up to 13 ounces, but you can drop much larger boxes in the package drop at your local post office. In theory. Dan found that this was trickier in practice, when every post office nearby had an operational postage machine, but the package drops were all locked.

An ex-mail carrier in suburban Chicago is pleading guilty to pilfering $275,000 in donations that were heading to a charity on his route, after being charged for stealing more than 29,400 pieces of mail in the effort. Perhaps he read his job description as “cash collector” or thought no one would be any the wiser.

It pays to have a good relationship with your mailman — after all, who better to notice when your mail is piling up, or when you haven’t come outside to chat? A mailman in Norfolk, Va. potentially helped save his customer’s life, after realizing he hadn’t stepped out to talk in days and that his mail had just been collecting inside.

AT&T tech support thinks that Aaron is a very small man. A few inches tall, at most. He could live in a dollhouse. That’s because his billing address is a post office box. He was very interested to learn that receiving mail there means that he is making calls from inside the PO Box, which is probably why his signal is so terrible. Not that he can tell, because he’s probably crushed under his phone somewhere.

The United States Postal Service is again standing on the edge of disaster with a looming Aug. 1 deadline to escape defaulting. If Congress doesn’t do something soon, said a spokesman, the USPS won’t be able to make a legally required annual $5.5 billion payment into a health-benefits fund for future retirees.

The United States Postal Service has a bit of a phishing scam on its hands in Fort Worth, Texas — or really, it’s almost an actual fishing scam. Scammers are apparently coating the blue standalone USPS mailboxes with adhesive, in order to catch outgoing mail and go through it to get money or personal information.

H. lives on a rural mail route, and her mailbox is secure, with a lock and a slot just big enough to slide letters through. When a package containing an expensive camera lens went missing recently, she learned that her mail carrier had put the package in the “parcle box.” The what? Oh, the unused but not secure mailbox on her street that some neighbor wrote “parcel box” on a long time ago. H. had no indication that her package had been placed in the box until the mailman left her a note about it. By then, the box had already been stolen. The post office, for its part, insists that the package was delivered as addressed.

You place a certain amount of trust in a company when you hand over a box of your personal belongings to be shipped across the country. You also have to be aware of the risk that your package might get lost or damaged along the way. But what you can’t really prepare for is that only some of your stuff will arrive… in a different box… with someone else’s stuff mixed in.

The United States Postal Service should be a bit more careful about packages it handles, especially if it’s going to damage one so badly that its contents start to shake loose. Also? While Amazon probably isn’t going to be shipping any kind of dangerous substances, once Consumerist reader Jeremiah and his wife explained that it was gluten-free flour, surely there’s no need to freak out about it twice. And hey, maybe an apology is in order?

We’ve heard numerous stories about carriers for the U.S. Postal Service pilfering mail intended for others. But it seems like a lot of those stolen items just end up piling up in the carriers’ homes. Here’s a story of a mail carrier in California who robbed drugs intended for Peter to get paid by Paul.

The U.S. Postal Service has announced its next step in the belt-tightening process of trying to cut down on its costs. It will close or consolidate operations at 140 mail processing sites through February 2013, said a postal official.

A postal worker in Florida says a mysterious leaking package coming from Yemen has caused him to be super sick, but the U.S. Postal Service says that package doesn’t even exist, and never has. The man has been to numerous doctors, and none have been able to diagnose his illness.

It was last July that the US Postal Service announced it was considering closing around 3,700 of its approximately 32,000 outlets around the country, many of them in rural areas. But earlier today the Postmaster General unveiled yet another plan that could keep hundreds of these offices from closing outright.

There was a time, around approximately 2001, when eBay was a global marketplace where you could easily and efficiently unload items with any market value that you wanted to get rid of. Now, it’s more of a global flea market full of scams and villainy. eBay and its old accomplice, the U.S. Postal Service, worked together to make Keith’s old iPhone disappear into the ether.

When Jessica placed her NewEgg order, she provided them with a shipping address. This turned out to be a waste of her time, since NewEgg just went ahead and picked an address to send the package to out of her PayPal account. Not the one associated with her credit card, or her primary address on the account. Certainly not the address where she actually lives. Their customer service representative’s solution? Wish really, really hard that the person who ultimately received the package would return it so she can get a refund. She hung up and called back until she got someone competent.

Contrary to the opinion of Nevada Senator Harry Reid, not everyone view junk mail as an indispensable conduit between elderly Americans and the outside world. In fact, most of us would rather do without it. That’s why officials in Austin took time off from rehearsing with their ska/bluegrass fusion trios to become the latest city to give residents a way to opt out of receiving unwanted mail.

There are few images more heartbreakingly depressing than an elderly person who eagerly awaits the daily delivery of mail — even junk mail — just so they’ll have something to look at that afternoon. But according to Nevada Senator Harry Reid, this is precisely why everything must be done to save the U.S. Postal Service.